Rebirth
by Chasing Dawn
Summary: "She couldn't look away, and didn't want to, because she saw something in the general that made an old hurt inside her ease. Just by looking at him Ivy knew that he understood. Finally, finally there was someone that knew what it was to be different."


**~Rebirth~**

**Prologue**

"_And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, and then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot; and thereby hangs a tale." As You Like It_

**Disclaimer: I do not own Final Fantasy VII. None of its characters belong to me. I make no profit off this work of fiction. The quotes I use are the property of the playwright William Shakespeare. This story is only to amuse me in my spare time and hopefully be enjoyed by the ones who choose to read it.**

_I have spent the better part of my life working in the field of science. I have furthered mako research to its fullest extent, and I alone have made it so that mere human beings become weapons of great power. Sephiroth was my greatest achievement, but now Specimen I is beginning to claim all of my attention. In the five years that passed since the incident at Nibelheim, the specimen has continued to surpass all my expectations. Though more often than not her presence causes the others distress, I have found the distractions to be merely that – distraction from a greater purpose._

_She responds to mako beautifully, her body growing stronger every day. Yet even after all this time I cannot attempt to give her Jenova's cells. Whenever I try to approach her the vials shatter in my grasp, and the few specimens remaining scream with her. To think so young a child, already possessing untapped potential, can destroy so easily. For reasons I cannot yet fathom, she cannot tolerate the presence of Jenova. They are of the same kind. Perhaps it is merely the surfacing of memories from all those years ago. If I could get her to speak, I could no doubt find more. The child is stubborn, just as Sephiroth was when he was a boy. It is of no great concern: Sephiroth learned to obey, and she will as well._

_Another phenomenon concerning Project I is how she affects the other specimens. When she is awake, they wake. When she screams, they howl along with her. If my suspicions of her origins are correct, then I can rightly assume that she becomes connected to each of the specimens, and through them her emotions are revealed. It was the reason why I had her moved from the mansion to ShinRa headquarters: she affected the specimens too strongly for them to be controlled. I moved her into a private cell, where no one save myself and the few scientists I can depend on can oversee her progress. _

_Of all the puzzles this child presents, only one continues to elude me beyond mere scientific interest. Why did Sephiroth react so strongly to her? Reports from the Turks state that Sephiroth took the child from the burning village to the reactor. What makes the girl special enough for Sephiroth to willingly spare her life? If she truly is Cetra, then - _

"Professor!"

Hojo lifted his head from his journal, a murderous scowl on his face. "What is so important that you burst in here without permission?" He snapped, shutting the small black book curtly. This particular scientist was new to the program and already proven to be imbecilic. Hojo never bothered to remember names. When he called they answered. It was enough. The young man at the door was as pale as a ghost, his hand trembling as he lifted it to his mouth. Hojo waited impatiently, his thin brows arching. He hadn't the time to waste with inexperienced fools. There was much work to be done, considering the two specimens he had already lost to the idiocy of his followers. Hojo's jaw tightened. A year had passed and the memory still made his blood boil.

"Sp-Specimen I," the assistant stammered, sweat making his skin clammy in the dim lighting of the office. Hojo stared sharply at him, his interest piqued. "She's g-gone, sir."

"What do you mean, gone?" Hojo demanded, rising from his seat. The other flinched, wordlessly pointing outside of the door. Hojo stormed past him, grinding his teeth in an attempt to quell his fury. "How hopelessly incompetent can you be that you can't even keep track of a comatose child?"

"Sir, all the assistants that were monitoring her process are dead." Hojo didn't pause, but the news intrigued him. The specimen had never killed anyone before. She had hurt people with her strength when they attempted an experiment that frightened her, but she never intentionally aimed to kill. "I only discovered them a few minutes ago. There was smoke everywhere; the pipes have burst. Specimen I's mako container has shattered."

"Are the cameras still functioning?" Hojo barked, glee bubbling up inside him. Five years spent on the child, and finally there was true success. He needed to see all that she could do. Now that her abilities had manifested in a significant manner it wouldn't be long before she had to use them. Sephiroth had been the same. _She couldn't have gone far, no matter what she accomplished here, _Hojo assured himself. He made doubly sure that none of his specimens could escape after the disastrous loss of Specimens C and Z. Hojo gritted his teeth.

"I don't know." The assistant flinched when Hojo whirled around with a furious glare. He hadn't the time for all these soft-hearted fools. He had once believed the boy to be at least competent in the field of science, but once faced with any deviation from the project he proved himself to be utterly useless. Hojo would have to dispose of him at some point.

"Then go see if they are, you idiot!" The man scurried away, Hojo snorting unbecomingly as he continued the rest of the way alone. Retrieving his key card, he swiped it through the device outside of the room where he had kept Specimen I for the past three years. He narrowed his eyes as a great gust of hot air and smoke rushed out when the door opened, waving a hand in front of his face as he entered.

As the assistant had said, every pipe in the room had burst, resulting in a massive cloud of steam wafting through the air, water and other substances coating the floor along with countless shards of glass from the broken mako container Specimen I had occupied. Five bodies lay motionless and face-down in the water. Two had their heads crushed; two more simply lay twisted, their skin riddled with broken glass. The last, however, was killed far more brutally. The body was that of the youngest scientist of the group, a boy more than a man. His chest was concaved; Hojo couldn't say for sure, but it appeared as though his ribs had been broken or crushed to such an extent that they couldn't support the boy's torso. Hojo examined the room with a critical eye: it would have had to take colossal force to break the pipes and the glass, the same being said for the assistants. The computer that had been monitoring her progress was nothing more than shredded metal and flying sparks. They had been watching a sixteen-year-old child in a mako-induced sleep; there was no feasible way that she could have done this, save for the powers that had not yet manifested in such a manner.

The specimen had shown other signs of power throughout the five years he had kept her close. She was incredibly strong for such a small girl, and her senses were phenomenal. Not once in those five years had he ever been able to come upon her unawares, not even while she slept. Whenever he entered her little room she would be upright and staring, her eyes glowing luminescent in the darkness. It had been exactly the same with Sephiroth. Hojo smirked to himself: he had been convinced that there had been no other like the boy, yet Hojo had found his equal in that little girl.

_Perhaps that was why he took her. He finally found another like him. _Hojo had speculated since the night when Sephiroth had disappeared about why the general of ShinRa had saved her from Nibelheim's fate. Sephiroth was incapable of love, of any feeling, but to find someone else so similar when everyone around him had been simply too human must have been unnerving. Perhaps Sephiroth had wanted to know the girl, or simply acknowledge that someone else like him existed. It could have been because he had come to the same conclusion that Hojo had: the girl was a Cetra, one of the last of her kind. Hojo would never know unless his other experiments were successful. Until then he could only guess, but he was fairly certain of the cause. Hojo grinned to himself as he stepped around a particularly mangled corpse. When Sephiroth returned, Hojo would find a way to capture Specimen I and bring her to him. The Cetra could rise again, Jenova's legacy reborn.

"Sir!" The assistant waved to him from the open door. "Some of the cameras are still working!" Hojo nodded, muttering of the possibilities as he stepped through the ankle-deep mixture of spilled mako and water. He idly thought it was fortunate that the water had diluted the potency of the mako solution. Otherwise his clothes would have burned as quickly as if they'd been dipped in acid.

When Hojo reached the room where he kept all his recording devices the assistant immediately pointed to two screens. "The second camera was completely destroyed, but the first and third still have their tapes." Hojo scowled. The second had been directed at Specimen I's mako container; the first pointed towards the computer where all the data concerning her was kept, the third at the station where the other scientists and assistants gathered to compare notes and what they had observed while watching the specimen. Nearly useless, but enough that he would at least be able to piece together what had happened.

"Play the first," Hojo ordered, leaning back and adjusting his spectacles. The man obeyed, fumbling with the controls a moment before stepping back, allowing Hojo to peer at the screen. Snow and static erupted on the monitor before clearing, revealing the computer before it had been destroyed. Hojo fiddled with the volume before the clear, rhythmic sound of a recorded heartbeat pulsed out at him. The computer registered the specimen's heart rate, brain waves, blood pressure, and how her body was adapting to the newest solution of mako. Hojo could faintly hear chatter in the background, but ignored it in favour of watching the recording.

He waited for twenty minutes, watching and hearing the even beating of her heart, eyeing the lines that indicated her blood pressure to assure himself that both were at their normal rate, and the faint blips that signalled that her brain was in a sleeping state. Hojo glanced away for a moment to check the other screen, which kept a more accurate account of the specimen's mako reaction. As he scanned it the monitor erupted in a shrill alarm. As he whirled around he glimpsed the brain wave lines surging violently, cresting the surface of the screen at the same time as the lines indicating her body's reaction to mako spiking just as furiously.

"_What's going on?"_

"_She's…her eyes!"_

"_Activate the materia! Do it!" _ Hojo was fascinated; despite her brain and body reacting as they were, her heartbeat remained steady. There was the sound of human screaming, glass shattering, and then the recording ended.

"Play the next one!" Hojo demanded, giddiness at the revelation making him lightheaded. It was extraordinary, her reaction. Even Sephiroth had never broken a mako-induced slumber, especially not after being put back to sleep by materia. And what had they meant, her eyes? Had the mako reacted in another way? When the specimen first came to him he had noted the unusual shade of her eyes and how bright they seemed despite there being no mako in her body. When he first introduced the substance into her system, all of his assistants had been captivated by how lovely the grey was when shining, nearly silver in their brilliance. While the effect was beautiful – and Hojo only used that term scientifically – he had focused more on what her mind and body were capable of enduring.

The next tape flickered and buzzed before coming into view, the assistant wringing his hands, his face still shining with sweat. Hojo ignored him once again. The five assistants were there, still alive, and they were standing and chatting. Hojo frowned. He paid the idiots to work, not to sit around and talk.

"Fast-forward it to when the specimen reacted," Hojo ordered. When the assistant complied Hojo waited, nearly shaking in excitement.

"_What do you think it means?"_ One of them, a homely brunette with a hideous mole on her upper lip, asked. She was drinking a cup of what Hojo assumed was coffee. _"These spikes of brain wave activity aren't normal for someone in her condition."_

"_The professor did say she was exceptional. She's smarter than most children that age, and much, much stronger. It's unsettling," _said another, an elderly man who at least had the makings of a decent scientist_. "She's almost animal-like. Have you seen the way she watches us when she's awake?"_

"_That could just be self-preservation." _Silence followed the younger man's statement. He held up his hands as the others stared at him. _"Think about it! All that he's done to her-"_

"_Shut up!_" The woman with the mole hissed. _"You know he has this room bugged!" _Hojo smirked. She was right to be afraid. It would have been nothing to simply say the man had left the program and work on him in privacy. There was still so much Hojo didn't know about a normal human's reaction to the drugs he was developing.

"_All of you_-" The fourth of the group froze mid-exasperation, turning towards one of the monitors to his right. _"What is this?" _An unbearable silence permeated through the recording. _"But…that's impossible! There's no way-"_ The alarm from the last tape shrieked through the speakers. "_What's going on_?" He demanded, tapping a rapid sequence into the computer. The others had turned around, presumably staring at the mako container. The woman had gone pale, her mole grotesque against her face.

"_She's…her eyes_!" She exclaimed in horror.

"_Activate the materia! Do it!"_ The elderly man screamed at the one facing the computer. A moment later the sound of glass shattering pierced through the speakers once more, along with the screams of the scientists. Hojo watched in awe as the screen went white. A long silence followed, deafening after the previous cacophony, before staggered breathing reached Hojo's ears. The screen flickered, revealing the younger man's panic-stricken face. He clutched at his arm, turning to look over his shoulder. _"Send help_," he stuttered. _"I…I don't know how, but she woke up. She's-" _he cried out and vanished, grabbed by an unseen force. Hojo hissed in annoyance, but silenced himself when he heard the man pleading. _"Please! Please, I'm not going to hurt you! I never wanted to hurt you. You know that, don't you?" _Hojo's lip curled. He'd suspected that the boy was infatuated with her from the beginning.

"_NO! NO PLEASE!" _The boy's howl of agony was cut short, and his body flew into the monitor, cracking it so severely that the screen went dark. Somehow the machine was still functioning, for Hojo could hear her breathing. It couldn't possibly be the boy. If the mangled, concaved chest of his corpse was anything to go by he died instantly. He marvelled at the even rhythm of her breaths; she was as calm as if sleeping. There was a sound of splashing water, an abrupt squeal, and then the sound from the monitor cut out completely.

"Sir?" Hojo nearly started. He'd forgotten that the remaining imbecile was still present. "What do we do? If the specimen escaped-"

"She may have escaped here, but she cannot leave headquarters," Hojo interrupted slowly, working the problem over in his mind. He could inform the president of the mishap, but the man was a cowardly fool. If he knew of Specimen I's power, he would kill her without thought. But if he were to leave her to be discovered without previous warning, the president would undoubtedly kill her anyway. "We will bide our time for now. She won't get far."

No, Specimen I couldn't possibly escape. ShinRa Headquarters was the most heavily guarded place on the planet. With infantrymen and SOLDIERs covering nearly every floor, it would be impossible for her to go undetected for long. Once he found the girl, his experiments could continue.

_Maybe once she's found I'll allow her to remain outside the laboratory,_ Hojo mused as he ordered the assistant to clean up the mess. _Sephiroth was stubborn, but being amongst these fools showed him that he was greater. It will be the same for her. _Hojo grimaced softly. Now the question was what to do. The energy readings wouldn't go undetected no matter how thick the walls were. He would have to compose some excuse for the president.

Hojo comforted himself with thoughts of the embryos growing in a separate chamber. They would occupy his time until Specimen I returned to him.


End file.
